I just found out — thanks to a tweet from abertonykus — that this exists: That’s me on top of the Giraffatitan , Matt to the right, and Darren swinging from its wattle. It’s the work of classicalguy on Deviant Art. He provides a poem and some brief commentary along with the original. There also one for the Tetrapod Zoology podcats, and one for Tom Holtz.

As I mentioned a few days ago, Matt and I have a couple of papers in the new PLOS ONE Sauropod Gigantism collection.

This is an exciting day: the new PLOS Collection on sauropod gigantism is published to coincide with the start of this year’s SVP meeting! Like all PLOS papers, the contents are free to the world: free to read and to re-use. (What is a Collection?

Let’s take another look at that Giraffatitan cervical.

I thought I’d done a decent job of illustrating MB.R.2180:C5 last time, but Wedel was not satisfied, demanding ventral and right-lateral views as well as the provided right lateral, anterior, posterior and dorsal. All right then: here you go! Here once more, for comparison, is Janensch’s (1950) illustration of the same vertebra:

Janensch’s (1950) paper on the vertebral column of Giraffatitan (which he called Brachiosaurus brancai , wrongly as it turns out) is in many ways a superb piece of work.

Back in 2008, Matt and I were at the Museum Für Naturkunde Berlin. We spent some time down in the collections, where we were particularly pleased to see the much-admir’d C8 of Giraffatitan ‘s paralectotype, MB.R.2181 (previously known as HMN SII). While we were down there, we found a C8 from Plateosaurus , too, so we put that next to the Giraffatitan vertebra and shot them together: I’m just sayin’, is all.

Now this is super-freakin’ cool, and I’ve been meaning to blog about it for a while.

This photograph is of what I consider the closest thing to the Platonic Ideal sauropod vertebra: it’s the eighth cervical of our old friend the Giraffatitan brancai paralectotype MB.R.2181.

I don’t have time to write about this properly, but a few people have asked me about the new Sellers et al. (2012) paper on measuring the masses of extinct animals — in particular, the Berlin Giraffatitan — by having a CAD program generate minimal complex hulls around various body regions.